For The Lucky Few, Hot Coffee, Ice Cream And Guilt

MICHAEL MAYO COMMENTARY

WESTON — I made a left at a traffic signal that worked, drove past the largely unscathed Tequesta Trace Middle School and turned onto Seabay Road.

"Are you the ones who never lost power?" I asked.

"Yup, that's us," Joe Arena, 21, said.

"Everyone hates you," I said.

"I almost hate myself," Arena said.

"We're the lucky 2 percent," chirped his sister, Taylor Arena, 22.

This was strange, my Wednesday trip to an electrified oasis in the post-Wilma desert. A place where coffee makers dripped and ceiling fans whirred, where pool pumps hummed and FPL meters spun.

A place where the local strip mall, Weston Lakes Plaza, had children licking Baskin-Robbins ice cream cones and chomping McDonald's burgers, adults pumping gas at a Shell station and buying chilled groceries with credit cards at Publix.

Maybe there's something to this buried power line thing after all.

"I'm going to e-mail Weston City Hall and say, `Thank you Lord,'" said Sandy Flint, 54, who has lived on Sea Bay Road in the Hibiscus Isles subdivision since its 1990 opening. "And when I sell this place, I'm going to put on the flyer: `Never lost electricity during Hurricane Wilma.'"

Actually, they did lose power. For 45 minutes.

They were surprised it returned so soon, during the height of Hurricane Wilma on Monday morning.

Not everyone in Weston, or other places with buried electric lines, fared so well.

But the turbine gods smiled upon the people of western Weston. They were among the 2 percent of South Florida residents whose power stayed on after Wilma barreled through.

As Florida Power & Light Co. began to restore electricity to some 2.5 million customers in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, a process that could take up to four weeks, the residents of Seabay Road felt an odd mix of pride and shame.

"I feel guilty," Taylor Arena said. "We went to Publix yesterday and my brother was going to buy filet mignon for dinner, but it just didn't feel right."

"I feel so bad for everyone else," said Carey Green, 38.

But residents want you to know that not all is freshly baked biscuits and hot gravy here, a pristine slice of suburbia where the two-story homes come with two-car garages and vaulted ceilings. They still had to deal with trees that crashed into roofs, patios and pools, along with mangled screens and torn-up barrel tiles. They also had to contend with low water pressure and disruptions to telephone and cable TV service.

"I don't think anyone's feeling sorry for us," said Jane Terramoccia.

"I'm not complaining," said Sandy Flint.

Althea Franklin was kind enough to invite me into her house, where she flicked a switch and I marveled at a light bulb that actually worked.

Franklin does hypnotherapy with AIDS and HIV patients, and she said she felt terrible for her clients, who were scrambling to find ice for medications that needed refrigeration. She's been in touch with a client who lives on the 15th floor of a Galt Ocean Mile condominium, where the generator failed and no elevators work.

"I feel like I should go rescue this woman," said Franklin, 60.

Terramoccia's elderly aunt from Pembroke Pines was staying with her, and other residents braced for an onslaught of friends and relatives if the weather heated up.

There was a barrage of outsiders at Weston Lakes Plaza on Wednesday, where the wait for gas was two hours and the drive-through lane at McDonald's had pedestrians as well as cars.

McDonald's inside counter was closed, and people who didn't want to waste precious fuel idling in line opted for al fresco waiting between cars.

There were other strange sights, including people recharging cellular phones and computers at functioning outdoor sockets, while residents from electrified subdivisions rented DVDs and video games from Blockbuster.

"My first coffee in three days," said Michael Parker, 28, of Sunrise, as he sipped on an extra large cup from Dunkin' Donuts and charged his phone in a socket located on an outdoor pillar.

Over on Seabay Road, residents praised buried power lines, noting the longest they've lost electricity during any storm in the past 15 years was four hours.

Many new developments opt for buried lines, but FPL says it would be prohibitively expensive to retrofit older neighborhoods. Burying all residential lines in Florida could cost more than $50 billion, according to one estimate, and could be harder to repair in areas prone to flooding.

For now, we'll just have to be jealous of how the lucky 2 percent live.